For his children’s films, Robert Rodriguez long ago established his own style in strip-cartoon type graphics, garish colour schemes and affordable digital effects – notably with the genuinely likable and now almost 20-year-old gem, Spy Kids, which starred Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino. But since then, his line in family movies has felt visually wearing, hectoring and pretty flat, without much in the way of a funny script. This new one pops thinly like day-old bubblegum, with the same lack of anything satisfying or nutritious.
It is a sequel to his entirely disposable 2005 kids’ film The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D, which felt like he had knocked it out in a month in his edit suite. This follow-up isn’t quite as insufferable, but it has the same tendency to confuse hyperactivity with energy, and that reference to David Bowie in the title is not earned, unless we’re talking about turning into a type of chocolate assortment.
Taylor Dooley returns as Lavagirl, but Taylor Lautner, the original Sharkboy, was apparently not available for this movie, so his character is now behind a mask. These characters are only cameos anyway. Now it is all about the new tween generation, the wacky, moody kids of the superheroes, particularly Missy Moreno (YaYa Gosselin), who is the daughter of Marcus Moreno (The Mandolarian’s Pedro Pascal – also appearing as a supervillain in Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984). She and a bunch of other Gen Z contemporaries find themselves cooped up in a creche-style school classroom in the grownup superheroes’ HQ, presided over by the stern Ms Granada (Priyanka Chopra) until they realise they have to save the world against an alien invasion.
This is pretty ho-hum stuff, but it could keep very young kids quiet over a lockdown Christmas.
• We Can Be Heroes is released on 25 December on Netflix.
